Indeed, aside from the problems with being allowed to interview players due to image conscious front offices, the other bugaboo afflicitng oral history accounts is that the subject of the interview will often use it as an opportunity to toot their own horn or inject their accomplishments with more glory than they deserve. Furthermore, memories can be wrong or hazy and every human being has their own psychological filter through which they see things and it can distort what actually happened. For example,  Cappy Harada. a twice wounded veteran of WWII who does deserve considerable plaudits for his accomplishments during his involvement with Japanese baseball, comes off here as a kind of Forrest Gump, seemingly portraying huimself essentially as being everywhere at the time, even taking credit for getting the Russians to release captured Japanese soldiers from Siberian prison camps, something I can't find any corroboration for. Also, if one reads  this site , he may also have exaggerated his role in the formation of the current two league system. On the other hand, there is no discussion of his important role of enabling the construction of Osaka Stadium and the political intrigue between the Nankai Hawks, the Shochiku Robins, and the U.S, occupation authorities that was engendered by it.  

Then there is Daryl Spencer's portion of the book, in which he basically insists that he taught the Japanese how to play baseball. Spencer, not exactly the most savory person on the planet, did indeed show some of the way in analyzing player tendencies to some extent while he was with Hankyu. But it also needs to be said that it was Nankai shot caller Kazuto Tsuruoka who appointed the first advance scout in Japanese history long before Spencer even signed to play pro ball in MLB. Also, let us not forget the hard charging style of Wally Yonamine infused more aggression into Japan's top sport well before Spencer.  

But those are really the only two parts of the book that rub one the wrong way. Fitts was fortunate enough to have been able to talk with Don Blasingame and it resulted in the most fascinating facet of it, that he was the shadow manager when playing manager Katsuya Nomura was ostensibly running the team so that Nomura could concentrate on his backstop duties.  

Greg "Boomer" Wells' section drew interest due to his assertions a few years ago that he was moved to Japan so that owner Calvin Griffith 
could clear the way for the white first baseman Kent Hrbek and make some money on the side. This time, Wells doesn't mention the race angle at all and portrays Griffith, who has indeed had checkered relations with non-whites in the past, as threatening to black ball Wells unless he reported to Japan so that Griffith could collect on the cash Hankyu had promised.  

Wells also claims that when he saw a rookie named Ichiro Suzuki and the way he used his hands, he new that the kid was going to be a star and urged team management to put him in the lineup immediately. That could be true, I saw Ichiro on tv in just one plate appearance and even I could recognize that he was a star in the making. So Wells may be telling the truth here. Nevertheless, Wells' suggestion fell on deaf ears and Ichiro was consigned to the minors before Akira Ogi was brought in to skipper the ballclub.  

Perhaps the most Japanese, if one wants to view it that way, interview was with former San Francisco Giant Masanori Murakami, who talks about the inner conflicts of wanting to play in America while also wanting to stay true to the Japanese values of "on (owing somebody one)" and "giri" (repayment of gratitude)" that informs Japanese society. It left him with a Hobson's choice of either going back to Nankai and the regimented life of a player in Japan or running the risk of being seen as ungrateful for what Nankai had done for him. You will have to read the book for what happened next, but it is clear that Murakami should have remained in the big leagues.  

Almost all the interviews have a few common threads to them: the spring workouts were like boot camp and foreign players often couldn't keep up; almost all the foreign players loved their teammates; the decisions surrounding the use and disposition of personnel that were made seemed to often be more for cultural reasons as opposed to purely baseball ones; managers often based their decisions on gut feeling rather than playing the percentages; there was indeed racism invloved in trying to prevent American players form winnign the Triple Crown and other titles; but that even with all that, almost to a one they are glad they played there and were grateful for the experience.  

One other thing everyone agrees on is Shigeo Nagashima. The praise for Nagashima's ability herein backs up a quote Ken Boyer once uttered to the Japanese press back in 1958, "he is ready for the big leagues right now."  

Of course, the question of who else had MLB petential comes up and there are a wide array of players mentioned, with the other favorites being Sadaharu Oh, Lotte hall of fame hurler Choji Murata and, get this, Yomiuri pitching great Takumi Otomo.  

This is such a fun and interesting read that the 221 pages seem to go by in no time at all. If Fitts had doubled that, it still would have been  
too short, such are the quality of stories and anecdotes contained in it. For my money, this is one of the baseball books of the year already 
and let us hope that there will be a sequel.  

Fitts' next book will be about Yonamine and is about two years off from seeing the light of day. The quality of Remembering Japanese Baseball is such that one can hardly wait for that one, too. 

It spends a good deal of the early part of the book recounting the rather shady backgrounds of many of the early MLB team owners, their often even shadier business practices (the section on Charles Stoneham's stock swindling activities is particularly interesting) and the politics between the National and American Leagues, their minor league counterparts and the relationships between teams in the same circuit lends the reader attempting to understand the how the clown show that is the motley assortment of nincompoops who run your local and other pro nines came to be is extremely valuable and captivating. Those of you concerned about the current situation with the Expos will find it especially illuminating.  

It then moves on to how the Yankees became the colossus of the major leagues and how mistakes made by their competitors, such as the Boston Red Sox and the New York Giants, provided the spark for decades of domination in fascinating historical detail that shatters a lot of myths, especially the ones that propound the equation of Babe Ruth's sale to the Yankees being the big lever that spelled doom for beantown while giving big ups to the Big Apple. Actually, it was the combination of a series of deals between the Red Sox and the Bombers that made that happen.  

Furthermore, the story that has Boston owner Harry Frazee selling the Babe to New York so that he could finance the production of No No 
Nanette is exploded.  

What happened is that the Yankee ownership were smart businessmen who put baseball people in charge and got out of the way. They also reinvested in the club to build it up even more while other owners sapped their team's bottom line by skimming the profits for their own use that could have been used for player development (Stoneham pops up here again).  

You also have the beginning of the kind of stick up ethos that governs the relationship between teams and their localities today in the Brooklyn Dodgers episode, when Walter O'Malley attempted to blackmail Brooklyn into forking out tens of millions of dollars in de facto subsidies for the new park that it could ill afford. O'Malley was even offered what would become Shea Stadium, but he kicked that idea aside and hyed off to L.A., where city councilman Kenny Hahn and his band of beggars, which is how they come off,  gave O'Malley everything he wanted at considerable taxpayer expense. Stoneham comes off as pathetic in this section, as he was more or less wagged by the Dodger Dog in more or less being forced to go to the Bay Area. That any team had to play night after night in that glorified experiment in weather pathology, Candlestick Park, is almost abusive. Of course, this also left NYC as entirely a Yankee town.  

Fetters then moves on to the tribulations of the Yankees under CBS, where they were treated like little more than just another widget in the corporate machine and the team's fortunes sank as the Mets ascended. Most people don't realize that the ballpark in Flushing Meadows  
saw more fans go through the turnstyles year after year than at Yankee Stadium until rather recently.  

George Steinbrenner, a little rich boy with a domineering father, came in and wangled hundreds of millions from a bankrupt metropolis to 
renovate Yankee Stadium and, after pledging to be a hands off owner, he set a new standard for megalomanical behavior. His greatest success came when he finally backed off and gave more room to his player personnel people like the Yankees did in their golden era.  

Fetters also has a long discourse on the evolution of player status, the reserve clause and free agency and how the latter came to be. In fact, it is done in such careful detail that I would call it the definitive overview for a general baseball audience.  

Oddly, though, Fetters glosses over the 1919 Black Sox scandal that nearly deep sixed baseball's viability as the national pastime. There is almost no mention of it and what there was seemed little more than an "oh yeah, but."  

Aside from that glaring bobble, though, this is an outstanding work that is extensively researched and footnoted. For anyone interested in baseball economics or just baseball history in general, it is essential. 

It follows the career of the life of one Atsushi Kono, the son of an unemployed samurai and a pitcher at Waseda University around the turn of the century who not only would play on and lead tours against teams in the U.S., but who was effectively the father of Japanese professional baseball, helping to found the Nihon Undo Kyokai, Japan's first professional team, and the Takarazuka Undo Kyokai, Japan's second pro club. However, both of those teams were star crossed, the first going under when the government seized his ballpark in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake and the second being victimized by the depression.  

Kono later became involved with the pro league started by Yomiuri Shimbun owner Matsutaro Shoriki, the predecessor of what is now known as Nippon Professional Baseball or NPB. In fact, it was his and a friend's idea to build Korakuen Stadium. He was an executive with one of its weaker teams, the Eagles, and also was, for a while anyway, in the hierarchy in the league's management. But WWII would undermine the Eagles and it would ultimately help to seal the doom of Kono's postwar attempt to create a new team called the Tokyo Cubs that would have played at Korakuen.  

What happened is that when Japan launched the war, Kono, based on his experience in the U.S., knew that his country would lose and said 
so to his close friends. Nevertheless, Kono,  a product of the Bushido Code, felt that he and other Japanese owed it to his country to concentrate on doing what it takes to try to help win it and so he dissolved the Eagles rather than merely putting them on hiatus, as his friend and admirer Ryuji Suzuki, another important figure in the postwar Japanese leagues, advised. That dissolution would later be used 
by Tadao Ichioka, effectively the Giants frontman in both personnel matters and in the team's relations with the league, as a rationale for refusing the addition of the Cubs to the league roster even though there was a need for an eighth squad to efficiently fill out the schedule. (Goldstar would ultgimately be given that eighth slot). Since the Giants were Japan's most prominent nine, without Ichioka's approval, the request by Kono to add the Cubs would never even be put before the other owners for their assent or disapproval. In fact, the owner's representative for Hankyu hadn't even known about the new team until apprised of it by this book's author.  

Ichioka and Kono had a long rivalry going back to when Ichioka played on that Waseda nine that toured the U.S. with Kono as its manager. 
They had completely divergent views on the nature of professional teams as well, Kono looking at it as a chance to help cleanup a sport that had suffered a number of scandals at the college and high school levels by focusing on players' moral development. Thus, Kono was an idealist really doomed to fail in a world that on a day to day basis makes one moral compromise after another while Ichioka was more Machiavellian.  

Consequently, one gets quite an insight into the politics of pro baseball in both the pre-war and post-war milieu in this relatively short work (only about 189 pages) and the discussion centering around what happened to players and management during the height of the war is fascinating and illuminating. It is well researched, though repetitive at times. And it is perhaps a little on the pricey side for such a brief 
effort, too. Nevertheless, it has added nicely to the body of knowledge of the history of Japanese pro baseball and for that is well worth anyone's time. 

This books represents a dilemma in a way: the publisher is looking for tonnage potential (i.e., sales) while the author may be looking to produce a more academic work that would deepen the understanding of the subject he is researching. Consequently, while the title seems to promise a sociological foray into the increasing interaction  between Major League Baseball (MLB) and Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), it ultimately fails to be completely satisfying in that endeavor.  

Yet, having said that, this is still a valuable work  since, especially for the general  english speaking audience it is geared to, it brings into clearer focus the players involved and the politics that go on between leagues that are separated not just by several thousand miles in distance, but by different traditions and assumptions as well. For example, he writes about how from the earliest days of Japanese high school baseball the game has represented a test of will and spirit for many coaches and fans with abominations such as the 1000 fungo drill and driving players until they throw up blood. For Japanese, it is all about process whereas in the west it is about results. Much like boot camp, the hardship these players endure builds an esprit de corps. However, there are also casualties. If you're of the non-conformist inclination or can't standup to the workload, you are weeded out. For every Hiromitsu Ochiai, who has done it his way since he was a schoolboy, there are tens of thousands who fall by the wayside with either exhausted or bitter spirits or wrecked pitching arms.  

Whiting goes into great and illuminating detail as to how Ichiro Suzuki was raised from a skinny kid in Aichi Prefecture to perhaps the finest all around player in the world, with his father sacrificing enormously while Ichiro mostly slept through his classes at Aikodai Meiden High School. It then moves through his journey into the pros with Orix, criticized as not top league material by manager Shozo Doi, 
who can be said to represent the NPB establishment since he was an ex-Yomiuri Giant, and, ultimately, to MLB, though he seemed to have many more mixed feelings about that transition than was let on in the press on either side of the Pacific at the time.  

Whiting then takes us back to the Hideo Nomo-Don Nomura saga and how Nomura, who was a bit of a sociological phenomenon himself, the son of a woman who would later marry the greatest catcher in Japanese history, Katsuya Nomura, who then turned around and took a Godzilla-sized chomp out of the smugly complacent hide of NPB by guiding Nomo, then the most dominant pitcher in the Japanese game, into Dodger Stadium. Furthermore, Whiting  betrays the front running nature of Japanese society when Nomo turns from being  
considered a traitor to a hero with that wonderful first campaign he experienced even though he no longer had the 93-94mph fastball he once ran up to the plate with Kintetsu.  

Whiting is also quite sympathetic to Hideki Irabu, a guy this writer had strong misgivings about when it was announced that he was going to try to take an MLB shot. Irabu had legitimate near 100mph stuff in Japan, but he paired that with substantial makeup problems. The Chiba Lotte Marines do not come off well in all this or the mind boggling Bobby Valnetine episode. Valentine was there, as it turns out, not as a manager in his own right, but as a glorified foreign consultant. The players loved the guy and Valentine's affection for Japan is well evidenced here, but the front office had its own agenda. It was like putting A.J. Foyt behind the wheel of a Model T, a complete waste of the man's strengths due to a slow turning and outmoded engine.  

One interesting ommisson in Whiting's fascinating discussion of Don Nomura is that of the Robinson Checo affair. Checo was signed by the Hiroshima Carp out of their Dominican academy and won 15 games for them with a 2.78 ERA in 1995. Nomura became Checo's agent and rightly made demands for a hefty pay raise for his client over the peanuts that the Carp usually offers its academy signings in a country where every U.S. dollar has the purchasing power of about fifty cents. This lead to some very hostile toing and froing, with Hiroshima ultimately threatening to file a slander suit against Nomura, who was already Public Enemy Number One after taking Nomo to America. The salary dispute went to arbitration and, as usual, the owner's offer was approved while Checo's was rejected. Nomura, at the end of the day, had to issue a public apology to the Carp ownership and, iirc, he also  paid some nominal sum for the trouble he caused.  

Then at some point, Checo apparently fired Nomura (at least if what one MLB agent told me is correct) and his new rep gained Checo's release after a terrible 1996, signing a two year deal with Boston, where he washed out, before moving on to Detroit and L.A., where he also did zip and is now out of baseball. Those familiar with the Alfonso Soriano matter, which Whiting delves into, should recognize this as an atecedent, since a lot of the same also happened during the future Yankee and Ranger's time with Hiroshima. So that Whiting didn't discuss all this is curious, though it is possible his editor thought that Checo was too anonymous to most MLB fans to be germane and asked him to excise it.  

Indeed, if it's one thing that The Meaning of Ichiro really does well it is that it reads smoother than a brand new Cadillac rides over the road. This is one polished piece of work, engaging as all get out and as hard to put down as a bag of potato chips when you have the  
munchies and imbued with a delightfully understated sense of humor.  

That doesn't mean there weren't some jarring problems with this effort. The first half of the book has some interesting typos, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Japan's "god of hitting" being called "Tetsuji" and the phrase saabisu zangyou (uncompensated overtime) being written as  
as saabisu sangyou (free industry or free silkworm farming, depending on the kanji used) are two examples. The most irritating misspelling is shooto, which actually means, "putting out the lights," when he meant shuuto, a kind of changeup that in a very roundabout sense has screwball like action.  

Then there is the assertion in a quote from Doi that Sadaharu Oh had "struggled hard in the minor leagues during his first two or three years" before blossoming into a star. I've personally never heard of Oh spending any farm time, though it would have been possible his rookie year, when he played in 94 games and had 193 at bats with the big club. But after that, he was a regular player. So Doi was mistaken. 

Whiting also talks about how Ichiro had his garbage gone through while living on tony Mercer Island. That contradicts what I've read. Ichiro supposedly had a condo in Bellevue, not Mercer Island (note that what I read could be due to Japanese reporters' lack of familiarity with Washington geography), and said that he liked Seattle because people left him alone when he went out on the town. I've known folks who've seen Ichiro and his wife shopping in the local supermarkets and none of them have said he was being hassled. So he apparently wasn't "mobbed," as Whiting wrote.  

There is another interesting ommission with regard to Ichiro: Mariners CEO Howard Lincoln said several months ago that the team nearly didn't go after Ichiro "due to our experience with Mac Suzuki." Of all the stupid things I have heard from MLB executives, that ranks up in the top two or three. If you follow that line of "thinking," because the Dodgers had problems with Darryl Strawberry, they should shy away from black players. Or with the problems they had with Carlos Perez, they should stay out of the Dominican Republic. So thanks to the Mariners problems with Venezuelan head cases Carlos Guillen and Freddie Garcia are they going to refrain from scouting in that  
country? I would have liked to hear Whiting's take on that, though Lincoln could have utterted it past Whiting's deadline, I don't know.  

Too, what is his source for the claim that Shigeo Nagashima, while manager of the Yomiuri Giants, had slapped players. Mind you, that sort of thing is not uncommon, even in the corporate world, in Japan, but that was the first time I had heard of Nagashima, a firebrand as a  
player but normally known as a rather laid back soul off the field who happily accommodates fans who show up at his doorstep in Chofu, Tokyo and ask for autographs. Since this isn't an academic work, Whiting doesn't leave any footnotes, but I would like to hear more about Nagashima, who is to Japanese baseball imagewise what B.B. King is to the blues, mistreating his charges. He also missed a chance to analyze the loud verbal confrontation between Tommy Lasorda and Nagashima over Nichinan High School righthander Hayato Terahara, which left Tommy understandably bewildered. The reason that would be important is that we are getting to a stage now that MLB teams are going to start poaching top Japanese draft picks, as is seen in the interest by several stateside ballclubs in Tohoku High School's Yu Darvish, Meiji University's Yasuhiro Ichiba and Shidax moundsman Takahiko Nomaguchi, and Darvish is reportedly mulling actually taking the plunge. 

Also glossed over is that in the discussion of the Mike Di Muro incident, the umpire was pushed by Taiwanese Chunichi outfielder Yasuaki Taiho. How Taiho joined the Dragons is interesting in itself, but Taiho's first name here is omitted as was his nationality.  

In the section on Masanori Murakami, where the Nankai Hawks look like complete nincompoops, there was nothing about an actual trade that the San Francisco Giants had pulled off with the Lotte Orions, where they sent outfielder Frank Johnson to Japan in exchange for pitcher Toru Hamaura roundabout 1972. Johnson was a stiff and Hamaura never made it to The Show, returning to Japan beginning with the 1974 season, where he had an undistinguished eight year career. I would have liked to know what changed between NPB and MLB that enabled that transaction.  

On his stating that Mariners players were grumbling about "Japanese players taking all the money" when they learned of Seattle's intent to pursue Kazuo Matsui, I ran that by one of the local baseball writers here in the Seattle area and neither he nor his organization's beat writer had heard that directly from the players themselves, though he added the caveat, "that doesn't mean it didn't happen" given players' often "selfish paranoia." 

And on a pedantic point, from my research, former Hanshin, Nankai, Hiroshima and Nippon Ham hurler Yutaka Enatsu was busted for "kakuseizai (speed)" and not "ahen (heroin)," as Whiting indicated. Moreover, Enatsu had turned down a chance to pitch in the minors  
with Milwaukee with an eye to later being promoted if needed after not making the big club out of spring training, but he refused and retired. A small discussion of that, especially since if Enatsu had stuck around he would have beaten Nomo to MLB by some years, would have been interesting and may have even helped bridge the gap somewhat between Murakami and Nomo's stories.  

Again, however, there are a lot of hurdles to writing a book on a deadline with an editor looking over your shoulder the entire time, especially for a broad audience of baseball fans and not geeks such as myself.  In the main, this is more of a sequel to You Gotta Have Wa 
and expands on that nicely rather than being a profound sociological analysis of the consequences of Ichiro and the other Japanese players coming to MLB. So for what it is, this book does its job very well indeed and it certainly taught me a lot.